What are you Going to Do with Jesus?
"Some years ago I met a Muslim girl who was interested in Christianity," he
(Daniel B. Wallace) said. "She came to me with six handwritten, single-spaced
pages of supposed discrepancies in the Gospels. She had been taught by Muslims
that if you can find one error in the Gospels, then you can't believe anything
they say. She said to me, `You're going to have to answer every single one of
these before I can believe anything about Christianity.' My response was, `Don't
you think this list proves that the writers didn't conspire and collude when
they wrote their Gospels?' She said, `I've never thought of it that way.'
"I said, `What you need to do is look at the places where the Gospels do not
disagree at all. And what do you find? You find a core message that is
revolutionary: Jesus was confessed as the Messiah by his disciples, he performed
miracles and healed people, he forgave sins, he prophesied his own death and
resurrection, he died on a Roman cross, and he was raised bodily from the dead.
"`So now, what are you going to do with Jesus? Even if the Gospel writers have
differences in their accounts-whether we should really call them discrepancies
is a topic for later-then this only adds to their credibility by showing they
weren't huddled together in a corner cooking all of this up. Doesn't their
agreement on an absolute core of central beliefs suggest that they got the
basics right, precisely because they were reporting on the same events?"'
"What happened to her?" I asked.
"Two weeks later, she became a Christian, and now she's a student at Dallas
Seminary."
Strobel, Lee. The Case for the Real Jesus. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007,
p. 79.